November 9, 2015

Yes, no, maybe so. It's just that easy.

Stepping up on my soapbox now.

There are quite a few things that irk me in life. Bad drivers, people who are rude to wait staff, incessant sounds, etc. etc. etc. But you know what annoys me the most? Invitations and all that go along with them. Let me explain……
1.       I have a lot of people I like to hang out with. When I want to hang out with them, I call them and say, “Hey, do you want to hang out?” and they either say yes or no. I would say out of my group of friends, 4 of them ever call and ask me to do anything. I’m almost always the inviter. Does that mean my friends don’t want to hang out with me? Why is that, I’m super fun? I recently had a drink with a friend that I’ve known for years. I hadn’t seen him in a while so I said, “Let’s meet up!” and he agreed. As we caught up, he mentioned he had tickets to something the weekend prior but didn’t go because he didn’t have anyone to go with. Uh, hello.. thanks a lot schmuck! So it brings me to the “why” part of this scenario. Why am I always the inviter? Maybe all my friends don’t do anything until asked? Maybe I’m not as fun as I think? Maybe they are content sitting at home watching re-runs of Unsolved Mysteries? It’s weird and it kind of bugs me. Then again, I’m a social creature who needs to be around people most of the time which means if I want to be around people, I must ask people to be around me I guess..??

2.       I love to throw parties. Most of these parties include food or some type of preparation. How do you know how much food you’ll need? You send an invite out with an RSVP attached. I like to use evite.com because it has a list of all my friends that I’d want to come and it’s easy peasy to send one out. The other benefit of using evite is that you can send reminders, see who opened it, and keep track of people who RSVP’d- it’s a brilliant little website! The thing is, the majority of people never respond which is utterly frustrating and quite frankly, downright rude. I can see that you opened it, looked at it, and then nothing. If you aren’t coming, just hit NO! If you are, sweet, I will have a hotdog ready for you. It is not that hard to make a decision that includes three responses: yes, no, maybe.

3.       As the inviter, I think the most frustrating part is having those people who are always on the fence about doing something. They come up with the lamest excuse possible as to why they maybe can or can’t come. Just make a decision for crying out loud! If it’s a bonfire- no biggie, I could care a less if you RSVP since we are just sitting around a fire. But if it’s something that includes traveling somewhere, staying somewhere, figuring out food, that is not a situation where you are allowed to be willy nilly about the invite. I don’t want to have to wonder, “Oh, is he/she actually going to follow-through or are they going to cancel last minute?” I know a lot of these people by the way. I just can’t imagine how hard it is to agree to something and then just follow-through. I’m not asking if you’ll give me a kidney for the love of God. The benefit of all of this is that I know who these people are and almost always have a back-up plan because I know they’ll bail last minute. But what those people don’t know is that I’m biding my time until they do it that one time that ticks me off so bad that I just stop inviting them to anything and when the day comes when I have two free tickets to an all-inclusive resort in Tahiti, they won’t be invited. SO THERE! (in my childish, neener, neener, neener voice)
What I want to come from this rant is for those of you who are:  a) the people who don’t RSVP b) the people who RSVP and then no-show or c) RSVP but never follow-through… I want you to know that it isn’t small beans for some people. If you never got invited to anything ever again you’d be sad. It wouldn’t make you feel very good. So why risk that by being an insensitive invitee? You’re basically saying, “Hey, I know we’re friends and I know you like me, and I appreciate you thinking of me while doing this invite, but I don’t really care enough about you to respond/show up/follow-through.
As I slowly make my descent from this soapbox, I want all of you to think about the effort and thought that goes into a simple invite. It’s a meaningful thing to invite someone to something and you should take each invite as a gift; a gift that someone thought enough about you to extend that invitation.